Please read these instructions very carefully: Please provide a response to any three of the questions below. Each response must be at least 300 words a piece for a total of at least 900 words for your entire exam. Your exam is due in the Assignments folder of our course D2L Dropbox by 9 pm on Monday, April 10th, 2023. You may use your book, your notes, the YouTube videos I provided, and other sources on the internet to develop your answers. If you are citing to a specific page in Rankine’s Just Us, simply provide the page number in parenthesis—a citation to page 23 of the book would simply be provided as “(23).” Please type your answers underneath the prompts you are responding to below and do not erase other parts of the exam.
The subtitle of Rankine’s Just Us is “An American Conversation.” In what sense is Rankine conducting an American conversation? In your response, be sure to identify and explain the significance of several of the conversations that Rankine highlights in the first half of the book. What do these conversations highlight about race, power, and privilege in America?
Rankine’s reflections on structural racism in American life leads her to state the following about how the desire for “blondeness” manifests white supremacy and antiblack racism:
If white supremacy and antiblack racism remain fundamental structural modes of violence by which countries continue to govern, blondness might be one of our most passive and fluid modes of complicity. It points to white power and its value as desirable, whether the thought enters one’s head or not. As women say again and again how bleaching their hair lightens up their faces and make them more embraceable by men and women alike; or talk about their edginess with their new blonde cuts; or as nonwhites feel agency in owning a signifier of power they can’t otherwise owning a signifier of power they can’t otherwise own; or as the gray is held back and valued youthfulness is sought after; or as we reflect back to the world what it values, it becomes more and more difficult to pretend that our freedoms are not bound up with our complicity with the values of white supremacists (303).
What do you believe Rankine is seeking to convey through this passage?
Discuss Rankine’s reflections on racial privilege and radicalized violence by analyzing her discussion of the August 2017 white nationalist march on Charlottesville, VA. On p. 121, Rankine places the image of the twitter message from Tiki Co. that it sent out about the Tiki torch in the wake of the Charlottesville protest. What effects does placing this message on the left-hand page, in opposition to Rankine’s analysis on the right-hand side of the page, have upon the reader?
Rankine argues toward the end of the section of your reading for this week that the reason many whites do not have Black friends is because they do not want to face up to the history of racialized violence that has created white privilege and segregated enclaves that push Black bodies into living conditions that no one wants to acknowledge. For example, Rankine mentions a white person sitting down to dinner with a Black family and having to look at a cloudy glass of polluted water. What is Rankine seeking to do in her analysis by mentioning how racial segregation has produced environmental consequences for poor minority communities?
In her reflection that beings on p. 145 on a hallway conversation with a white man who states that his height is his biggest advantage in life, Rankine notes to herself that the man is overlooking his white privilege. This man states that, unlike many whites, he is comfortable around Black people because he played basketball. When Rankine asks this man if he is married to a Black woman, he replies that he is married to a white woman. Then, Rankine notes, “I don’t ask him about his closest friends, his colleagues, his neighbors, his wife’s friends, his institutions, our institutions, structural racism, weaponized racism, ignorant racism, internalized racism, unconscious bias—I just decide, since nothing keeps happening, no new social interaction, no new utterances from me or him, both of us in default fantasies, I just decide to stop tilting my head to look up” (145). What do you think Rankine is trying to convey here about how racism structures every aspect of American life? What significance do you attribute the “All Lives Matter” sign with the “V” blacked out on the opposite side of the page? Is this somehow a commentary on Rankine’s conversation with this man?
What points of disagreement do you have with Rankine’s reflections in Just Us thus far about racial privilege, white nationalism, friendship, and allyship? Are there aspects of Rankine’s analysis that strike you as problematic or wrong? For example, you may disagree that white privilege is as totalizing as Rankine asserts and that she is leaving out other factors. Discuss these disagreements to the best of your ability.
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